Jane Austen

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Standard Name: Austen, Jane
Birth Name: Jane Austen
Pseudonym: A Lady
Styled: Mrs Ashton Dennis
JA 's unequalled reputation has led academic canon-makers to set her on a pedestal and scholars of early women's writing to use her as an epoch. For generations she was the first—or the only—woman to be adjudged major. Recent attention has shifted: her balance, good sense, and humour are more taken for granted, and critics have been scanning her six mature novels for traces of the boldness and irreverence which mark her juvenilia. Her two unfinished novels, her letters (which some consider an important literary text in themselves), and her poems and prayers have also received some attention.
Photograph of a colourized print of Jane Austen, from a drawing by a Mr Andrews commissioned by Austen's nephew James Edward Austen Leigh as frontispiece to his "Memoir of Jane Austen", 1870 (fifty years after she died). She is shown seated, with a book on her lap, wearing a blue dress and light brown bonnet.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Intertextuality and Influence Sarah Harriet Burney
Lorna J. Clark, editor of SHB 's letters, notes the abundant portrayal in her novels of dysfunctional families.
Burney, Sarah Harriet. “Editor’s Introduction”. The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney, edited by Lorna J. Clark, Georgia University Press, 1997.
lviii-lix
This Burney was a discerning reader of recent and contemporary fiction, admiring Maria Edgeworth and James Fenimore Cooper
Intertextuality and Influence Catherine Gore
The title-page quotes and very slightly alters four lines from Pope beginning What gay ideas crowd the vacant brain,
Gore, Catherine. Mothers and Daughters. Bentley, 1849.
title-page
but whereas Pope's imaginary Teresa Blount was daydreaming idly and innocently of the dukes and...
Intertextuality and Influence Catherine Gore
The title-page quotes the passage in Swift 's Gulliver's Travels where the King of Brobdingnag hears from Gulliver about English politics and marvels that human grandeur can be mimicked by such contemptible insects.
qtd. in
Gore, Catherine. The Hamiltons; or, Official Life in 1830. R. Bentley, 1850.
title-page
The...
Intertextuality and Influence Molly Keane
This, like Good Behaviour, is a black comedy set in a crumbling Anglo-Irishbig house, Durraghglass. Unlike Good Behaviour it sets its protagonist family (of the same generation as Aroon St Charles) in...
Intertextuality and Influence Edna O'Brien
EOB has named many women writers as important to her: she includes among these Jane Austen , Emily Dickinson , Elizabeth Bowen , Anna Akhmatova , Anita Brookner , and Margaret Atwood , adding: Every...
Leisure and Society Elizabeth Heyrick
In the year 1827 EH 's reading included all of Jane Austen 's completed novels and Mary Russell Mitford 's Our Village.
Beale, Catherine Hutton, editor. Catherine Hutton and Her Friends. Cornish Brothers, 1895.
179
Leisure and Society Carola Oman
In a letter to the Times in 1962, CO described a bookcase in her writing-room which held the works she described as All the Winners. For a writer of fairly conservative views and strong...
Leisure and Society Jennifer Johnston
Although JJ says she is always reading contemporary young men and women writers coming out of Ireland today,
Moloney, Caitriona et al. Irish Women Writers Speak Out: Voices From the Field. Syracuse University Press, 2003.
67
in her short list of her most beloved books Ireland is just outnumbered by England and...
Leisure and Society Edith Somerville
In her later years ES set out to extend her reading. She tried Woolf 's A Room of One's Own (at the behest of Ethel Smyth ) and admired it. But she could not like...
Leisure and Society Rumer Godden
With books hard to come by, RG read and re-read those she had, often sent her by relatives and often new publications. She called Austenexactly what I need and likened herself to Emma.
Godden, Rumer. A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep. Macmillan, 1987.
207
Literary responses Ivy Compton-Burnett
Elizabeth Bowen , in her laudatory review, likened the icy sharpness of ICB 's dialogue to the sound of glass being swept up one of these London mornings after a blitz.
qtd. in
Spurling, Hilary. Secrets of a Woman’s Heart. Hodder and Stoughton, 1984.
160
ICB received a...
Literary responses Georgette Heyer
Laski argued that the taste for popular fiction stemmed from the fact that the serious modern novel had decided to deny itself the amenity of the shapely story satisfactorily resolved, so that compulsive novel readers...
Literary responses Diana Athill
Through her great age and greater panache DA became something of a cult figure. Edward Field wrote that she functioned for the British public as the Chief Guide to Old Age.
Field, Edward. “Edward Field’s Introduction”. Letters to a Friend, 2012, p. xi - xx.
xx
She was awarded...
Literary responses Lady Charlotte Bury
Edward Copeland thinks that this is the most challenging of LCB 's novels because of the complex interrelationship, in Delamere, between aristocratic pastimes, the arts, and the Whig aristocracy. He sees the amateur theatricals as...
Literary responses Charlotte Yonge
The Daisy Chain's popularity was long-lasting, though not so intense as that of The Heir of Redclyffe. Jane Austen 's nephew James Austen-Leigh compared it to the work of Austen and Scott ...

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